Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Kirk Marple has been a family man for 20+ years now. His kids are older now, in their 20's, which he finds amazing. He's been in tech for most of his whole career, but when he started out professiona…

Beier Cai has been in the tech space for 16 years, almost exclusively in early stage startups. The third startup he worked at did pretty well, which was HootSuite. He was the first engineer writing t…

Patrick Bryant lives in Charleston, South Carolina, and splits time in Washington, DC. He loves entrepreneurship, and believes it is the number one change agent in the world. He is involved in multip…

Or Weis has been a programmer or engineer since the age of 5. He started playing with DOS commands super early in his life. He made a significant leap in his professional skills when he was joined th…

Stephanie Florio's journey to tech started in the world of advertising. She always knew that she wanted to be an entrepreneur, but didn't really know what it was. Outside of tech, she has a young fam…

If you would have told Girish Redekar while he was in college that he would eventually be writing software, he would have been shocked. His studies focused on electrical engineering, and post school,…

Austin Parker started out at a young age with computers, writing programs in BASIC and hanging out on bulletin boards. Prior to his tech career, he held many other jobs - as a short order cook, waiti…

Stephen Mathai-Davis grew up in a family where he was expected to go into the buy side of Wall Street. Originally, he rebelled against this, pursuing professional kickboxing and even running his own …

Jimmy Jacobson grew up in Snoqualmie, about 45 minutes east of Seattle, Washington. He graduated from college in 2020, as the pandemic was breaking - but, directly correlated with the pandemic, he di…

Outside of technology, Lars Grønnegaard is an avid cyclist. He stats that if you've been to Copenhagen, where his from, you would know that a lot of people do cycling. He is into road or mountain bik…

Jack Naglieri grew up in Ohio, but moved to Virginia when he was 10. He had a normal east coast family up-bringing, but he focused on tech early on, even as a kid. Eventually, he went to George Mason…

For Itiel Schwartz, it's hard to remember life before his current venture. He studied computer science and psychology in school, and during that time he started working for Ebay. He's 32 years old (h…

From the time he was very young, Todd Larsen was always interested in technology. However, he ended up studying audio engineering so found his way to tech through teaching himself how to code. He gai…

Marin Smiljanic was born and raised in Croatia. He attended a local math school, which actually got him into tech. Post attending college, his first experiences of the industry were through internshi…

Aaron Bromberg is living the Dad life outside of tech. His kids are 11 and 13, so he wants to spend as much time with them before they get too cool to hangout with their parents. He likes to cook, an…

Joe Pettersson is quite the renaissance man, with many interests and ventures he is a part of. He's also had an interesting path to tech. He was originally a lawyer many years go... funny enough, bec…

Dan Langevin grew up in Madison, CT - east of New Haven. He had a good size family, with his Dad being an engineer and Mother being a teacher. He grew up around computers, and learned how to build we…

Roy Ng moved to LA from Hong Kong when he was 10 years old, first with his Mother, with his Father following on a year later. His family moved to the stats to build a future for him, with education a…

Alexander Luksidadi came to Canada in 2002 as an immigrant, with a dream to work for IBM. However, during his time in school, he had a friend that went to San Francisco, and came back "changed", as A…

Liran Haimovitch is 34 years old, and recently married. He and his wife enjoy traveling and eating delicious foods together, and of course, taking care of their awesome dog. Although it has been a wh…